The flirtation with literature, the coquetting with accomplishments which passed for female education, were shams, like the powdered _pouffs_ of hair and the face-washes. It was an age of shams, and women were told, in effect if not in words, that successful shamming was their _rôle_ in life. They were to sham sensitiveness, modesty, ignorance (which could not have been difficult), anything and everything which it was deemed likely would commend them to the perverted taste of the day. The vapourish, hysterical, fainting heroines of romance are only slightly coloured pictures of reality. The physical effects of the system of education were as harmful as the results on the mind. “Miss is set down to her frame before she can put on her clothes; and is taught to believe that to excel at the needle is the only thing that can entitle her to general esteem.... One hardly meets with a girl who can at the same time boast of early performances by the needle and a good constitution.”[67] _The Female Spectator_ issued a protest against that devotion to the needle, which was regarded as one of the cardinal virtues in women:-- “Nor can I by any means approve of compelling young ladies of fortune to make so much use of the needle, as they did in former days, and some few continue to do. In my opinion a lady of condition should learn just as much of cookery and of work as to know when she is imposed upon by those she employs in both those necessary occasions, but no more. To pass too much of her time in them may acquire her the reputation of a notable housewife, but not of a woman of fine taste, or any way qualify her for polite conversation, or of entertaining herself agreeably when alone. It always makes me smile when I hear the mother of fine daughters say, ‘I always keep my girls at their needle.’ One, perhaps, is working her a gown, another a quilt for a bed, and a third engaged to make a whole dozen of shirts for her father. And then when she has carried you into the nursery and shewn you them all, add, ‘It is good to keep them out of idleness; when young people have nothing to do, they naturally wish to do something they ought not.’” In the second half of the century, when the influence of the fashionable world was more strongly felt among the _bourgeoisie_, the boarding-school, with its flimsy accomplishments and its lack of solid education, began to attract the daughters of a different class. Hitherto it had been the monopoly of the so-called gentlefolk, but now mingling with these were the daughters of tradesmen and farmers, who had money to spend and a fancy for making “ladies” of their girls. It may have been a step up in the social ladder for these newcomers, but from an educational point of view it was no gain. The training of the fashionable boarding-school was only a veneer.